Chapter 1: What books are featured in this week's episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf, your weekly collection of new fiction. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And here we are ready for another Bookshelf in a moment. We'll tell you what the books are that we're reading today. But before that, Kate, exciting. We're getting ready for our next book club, which is going to be always in the first week of the month.
And this time we're going to be talking about Australian fiction. And we've been asking you to tell us about what you really value in Australian fiction and some really interesting suggestions coming in. People are talking about Randolph Stowe's The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Trent Dalton's Boy Swallows Universe. So older titles as well as really recent ones, Cassie.
Yeah, if you've been following the conversation on Twitter or Facebook, I think just about every Australian book ever written has been nominated and discussed. It's fantastic. But the one that we've selected for general consumption, i.e. go find a copy of it and read it before the first week of June, is The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazard.
And Kate, in 25 words or less, give us the premise of the story and a tease why we should jump into it.
Two sisters, two women, leave Australia the very end of the 1940s. It's a book that people rave about the density of the writing, the ideas that there are to be grappled with and why it's a book not just to read but to reread.
Okay, well, that's got me. Written in 1980 but set in the 40s. The Transit of Venus. I actually rang a couple of bookstores, second-hand bookstores, Kate, before I got my copy and Maybe Radio National listeners are already out there snapping them up. So do get your hands on one.
And I contacted a number of friends before I found one who still had a slightly battered copy on her bookshelf, which she brought around to me. So now let's turn to this week's books. New Fiction from Australia, America and Japan. Meiko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs. Jennifer Rosner's The Yellow Bird Sings. And Catherine Nosky's The Salt Madonna. And we'll begin there with The Salt Madonna.
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Chapter 2: What themes are explored in The Salt Madonna by Catherine Noske?
Bullying, to bully other people and the consequences of bullying. And we were quite mean to two people in our generation. And one of them turned out to be, he actually killed his friend's parents. Oh, wow. And the other one became one of Sweden's most famous bank robber. He was called the bicycle thief. He was very clever. He used to rob banks on a bicycle.
And then he disappeared in the old town in Stockholm where the streets are very narrow. So the police could never get him. And it's about him. And I have now established contact with him. You know, we're talking about how we grew up together, basically, at this school. So it's really, it's about that time and going back to the people that I grew up with and see how that time affected us.
And it actually has affected us quite a lot, that incident. And, yeah, so it's going back in time. But a lot of the stories, because we can't really use actors, it doesn't really work, I think, in this context. So we use animation. So that's how we're telling the stories back from schools.
But it's also how to use animation that is poetic or interesting that also takes time to find the right expression. And that's what I've been working on.
So it's a lot of work creating this project, but also I imagine a lot of work going back over this time and some of the pain that came out of it. You have family still in Sweden, Johan. How are they going?
They're going well. I have a 92-year-old mother who's very isolated in her house, and they're doing pretty well. I mean, Sweden is so weird. They seem to go against almost every other country, so they haven't really in lockdown or anything. There's almost business as usual, almost. And that is both terrifying, but at the same time, you know, part of me think maybe they are on the right track.
Maybe that's the way one should go. But I have friends who lost people in Sweden. Wow. Yeah, it's a very strange time to see. I mean, I think the deaths are, if it's 3,000 deaths, and I think here in Australia, like, we know to have hundreds, I just can't really get my mind about if they are really doing the right thing there.
And Suzanne Leal is also with us today on the bookshelf. She's a lawyer, a judge of literary prizes and a novelist. Hello, Suzanne. Hello. Thanks for having me. Now, your latest novel's just been published. It's called The Deceptions. Congratulations. Thank you.
That's great. Well done. Anyone churning out a book, I think they're so impressed by it.
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